Targeting YC Startups and the best GTM Engineering Agencies
This mistake wasted us 1.5 months in our SaaS.
Here's what nobody told us about launching GTM.
You've heard the question: "Who is your ICP?"
But really. Who specifically.
In the last 2 months I did 60+ discovery calls. 50% of them were a time waste for both sides. I tried to be helpful and consultative on every single call, but the real reason they went nowhere is simple. You gotta know exactly who you're trying to help.
Here's what we learned and where we're doubling down at OXYGEN.
Honest learning first: OXYGEN isn't trivial to pick up. But the depth is exactly what power GTM Engineers were missing in other tools.
That gave us a few hard requirements for our perfect customer:
- Already uses Claude Code or Codex - Has an existing GTM stack - Has enough GTM scale to justify setting up something like this
That cuts out a lot of companies. And we're fine with that. We don't plan to oversimplify the product. We want to serve the absolute power GTM Engineers who craved the flexibility, scale, and customizability they couldn't get elsewhere.
The trap with AI right now is that your product could technically help almost anybody. That sounds like a strength. It's not. You don't get market penetration that way. Nothing compounds. You're just slowly bleeding sales cycles.
So we got specific. The framework we landed on:
→ Talk to a lot of people first. I'm glad I did. You can't shortcut this part. → Follow the clues. Narrow on firmographic AND personal level. → Pick the persona inside the firmographic. It changes per ICP.
For us at OXYGEN it became:
1) GTM Engineering Agencies. The founders are the buyer. Clear. 2) Fast growing SaaS companies that already have a technical sales role. GTM Engineer or RevOps. YC-type Seed to C is the textbook case. We go in through that role, not the C-level.
Out of those, we built our dream 100 list.
Most of them we go after manually or semi-automated. We treat them like clients before they actually are. Because if we win a critical mass of these companies, they take care of the distribution for us.
Tier 2 leads get the high scale email + LinkedIn motion. But the energy goes into the dream 100. The product gets built for them.
If you're a founder still doing 60 calls a quarter trying to figure out your ICP, save yourself the months. Pick narrower than feels comfortable.